‘Dìdi” feels like a coming-of-age film, along the lines of “Eighth Grade” or “Mid90s.”
But director and writer Sean Wang, a Fremont native, said he believes that‘s not quite the case, since the movie’s 13-year-old hero doesn’t really come of age.
“I think it’s a loose term,” said Wang, who sat down with The Examiner to discuss the film. “Almost every movie is a coming-of-age movie,” he said. “Chris [Wang, the film’s protagonist] has a tough summer, but he doesn’t have any epiphanies about his identity.”
The movie is set in 2008 in Fremont, in the days leading up to Chris’ freshman year of high school. Chris (Izaac Wang), who is teasingly called “Wang Wang” by his friends and “Dìdi” by his loving mother, played by San Francisco legend Joan Chen (“The Last Emperor,” “Twin Peaks”). He spends his summer testing boundaries, thinking about romance, being online and learning the value of his family.
Just as Wang avoided being tied to the coming-of-age genre, he also said he doesn’t want his film to be classified as a “love letter to a city.”
“The hope was that it is textural, more of a feeling rather than commented upon,” he said. “It’s not like we go to all these landmarks in Fremont and do close-ups. You see the mountains in the background, and it’s distinctly Northern California. The hope was that all of it just seeps into the world of the movie.”
Watching the film is like traveling back in time. So much has changed in such a short time, technology first and foremost.
Characters communicate on flip phones, and via MySpace, AOL Instant Messenger, and a brand-new website called Facebook. Wang said he didn’t want to get hung up teaching his young cast all about the old-time tech. Indeed, the images of texting and typing and posting were all created in post-production, with the help of graphic designers and animators.
“I didn’t want to bog them down with the intricacies of technology, because ultimately that’s not what the movie is about,” he said. “Technology is just the setting where a lot of emotions are taking place.”
Wang said he has realized only recently what a gift it was for him to grow up in the Bay Area, and credits it for shaping his personal point of view.
“Growing up in the Bay Area and Fremont, I didn’t know any other filmmakers — I was the one kid that was into video stuff,” he said. “I went to film school in L.A. for two years, and all of a sudden everybody was a filmmaker and everybody was trying to do the thing that I was doing. And it was actually a little bit suffocating.”
“Being in the Bay Area and living a life, hanging out with your friends and having hobbies, and not being so entrenched in developing scripts and reading scripts and being in movie land all the time, is actually, for me, healthier,” he said.
Joan Chen stars as Chungsing Wang in writer/director Sean Wang’s “Didi.”
Chen, who has lived in San Francisco for more than 30 years, concurred.
“If I hadn’t moved to San Francisco, I wouldn’t have had the peace and the solitude to have written and directed ‘Xiu Xiu,’” she said, referring to her remarkable 1998 feature directorial debut. “Because if you’re in that state of mind, you’re more in touch with humanity, more in touch with living, things like cooking and doing laundry.”
During her last trip to Los Angeles, Chen said, she couldn’t find anything to wear.
“I hadn’t shopped for clothes in a long time,” she said. “I realized I didn’t have anything for L.A! You’re in the scene there. Everyone has a role to play. People take your picture — you know, the worst-dressed, the best-dressed. Here, things are more down to earth and not buzzing all the time.”
To play the part of Chris’s mom, Chungsing, who dreams of being an artist while raising her children with an absent father, Chen said she began by listening to recordings of interviews that Wang did with his real mom.
“I had Sean’s mom record all my lines, not to imitate her but to see if I could pick and choose something out of it, find something I never thought about,” Chen said. “Also, to make it more fun, so you’re not completely doing yourself.”
Yet, she said, the part resonated.
“In my heart, I can relate to her,” Chen said. “I’m also an immigrant mother who raised two American children, and I understand how fraught the relationship sometimes is. So this part was very cathartic for me to play, and I loved the experience.”
Wang and Chen shared a laugh over a scene they shot together, in which Chungsing takes Chris to a meal at McDonald’s, and Chungsing proceeds to totally dismantle her Big Mac and eat it, bit by bit, with a knife and fork.
“That is true,” Wang recalled. “My mom did that growing up. We were filming that scene, and my [director of photography] Sam Davis was looking at the monitor, and he was like, ‘That is, like, serial killer behavior!’ We actually got church giggles during that scene.”
